Skull and Mushroom Terrarium

I saw one of the little quarter machine capsules in my closest and thought it looked like a glass dome terrarium and thought it would make for a cute little diorama.

Cereal box cardboard

Polymer clay and tools (or toothpicks)

Quarter machine capsule

Acrylic paint

Felt

Ruler

Scissors

Craft knife

Dirt

Glue (hot, tacky/craft, and superglue)

Start by tracing the bottom of the capsule onto a piece of cardboard. Cut a few of these out. the more you have the taller the base will be. Or you can just cut 2 out of cereal box and one out of regular corrugated cardboard. Stack your circles and measure the height and add a little a rim. Use this measurement to cut a strip of cardboard that will wrap all the way around the base. Glue the circles together in a stack and the strip all the way around flush with the bottom edge of the circles.

Pull up some reference photos of a skull. Roll a slightly egg shaped ball of clay. In about the middle of the face carve out the eye sockets. I only really sculpted 3/4ths of the skull because most of it will be cut off anyway. Between the eye sockets hollow out the nasal cavity. The edges of the cavity should stick out a little. Just below the eye socket shape the zygomatic bone/ cheek bone (betcha weren't expecting to learn some anatomy were you). On the side continue the cheekbones into the temporal arch. For the teeth, just rough them in or carve out some sockets. Smooth things out add details you deem necessary but since it is so small and will be covered it doesn't have too be perfect.

Cook the clay according to the instructions.

Roll some snakes of clay. Twist them into some stalk shapes according to how you want them to fit around the skull. The caps I made in the photo are quite pointy but I flattened them out. To do this I rolled a small ball and flattened them out. Carefully attach the caps to the stalks. You can leave them them separated but superglue is really the easiest way to connect them after baking, so if you want to deal with supergluing small pieces, go right ahead.

Cook according to clay instructions.

Cut another circle of cardboard, but this time it needs to fit inside the plastic capsule.

Use a knife to shave down the skull so it lays flush against the circle and looks how you want. Glue the skull down. Layout the mushrooms before gluing them down as well. Make sure the plastic capsule still fits over the top.

Paint the base from step 1, brown or black including the inside.

Add shadows to the crevices in the skull and the base of the mushrooms if desired.

Paint the mushroom caps based on your desired mushroom colors.

This is a fun taxidermy tip I learned at school. Take some dirt (like a spoonful, max) and mix it with some glue. I used tacky glue and it worked fantastic. It should be the consistency of thick mud. Scoop/paint this mixture on to the circle with the skull. I tried to make my skull look half buried so I made sure to pile the glue mud up around the skull and in the eye sockets, nasal cavity, temporal arch as well. Do the same to the base of the mushrooms. I added some water to the glue mud to thin it out. I "painted" this over the skull to make it look like the skull was fully buried at some point.

Let everything dry.

To make the moss, take some scraps of various felts. I used light and dark green, blue, yellow orange, and white. For each scrap I just carefully chopped it up until it was basically dust. Do this for all the colors and leave them separated. You can mix the "dust" to get the perfect colors. You will want several colors for realism. Put glue where you want the moss to be and gently pat the "dust" into the glue.

Once everything has dried, center the skull base into the base and glue it down. Make sure the capsule still fits overtop. You can glue the capsule down if you want, I chose not to since it was less transparent than I had originally thought. The capsule fits flush so it stays on quite nicely.